


Not so much of man

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry V - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1900s, Alternate Universe - 1910s, Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - World War I, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Non-Canonical Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stealth Crossover, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 10:16:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2146959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love and death on a muddy field in France.  <i>Plus ça change</i> and all that. But some things are different.</p><p>Further content advisory: implications of and references to underage sex having taken place in the past, but no description of same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1917

**Author's Note:**

  * For [medeia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/medeia/gifts).



The sawdust-burning stove leached the hut of oxygen out of all proportion to the heat it emitted.  The tall, fair-haired captain, entering from the rain in a British Warm with a coarse grey scarf crossed over his neck, began to splutter and cough immediately.  His face was high-coloured with the particular floridity belonging to respiratory illness.  He was on permanent base now because he had spent the winter in hospital spitting up blood.  Two NCOs were sitting on bully beef tins by the stove, murmuring in the accents of the colonies. The sheet metal of which the hut was made said _pang-pang-pang_ in response to middle-distant ordnance. The fair man did not know the name of the sturdy, dark-haired officer at the trestle table.  He could swear he had once known it, but he did not know it now.  The dark man was also a captain.  He was filling out a form in the dim circle of light cast by a safety lamp, and making a scratchy job of it. 

‘The draft won’t be off until six ack emma, and it was supposed to go at midnight, damn it.  I could have had almost a night’s sleep.  We all could have had almost a night’s sleep.’  There was a waver in the fair officer’s voice. ‘We won’t have any sleep now.’

‘Fire extinguishers.’  The way the dark man said the first word was almost disyllabic, and that, the other felt, should give him a clue to his identity, but it didn’t.

‘All right, tell me about fire extinguishers.  It’ll pass the time.  Is that cocoa?’

‘Mmm.  Help yourself.  Fire extinguishers.  Every hut should have one, because of those bloody little hazards,’ he indicated the stove. ‘But the War Office won’t issue them, because we have the wrong sort of men.’

‘The wrong sort of—’

‘Exactly.  Apparently, if you set fire to them, Dominions troops don’t burn. If we told the Germans about these supermen we might all get home for Easter.’

‘So—you order them from a civilian firm and bill the W—’

‘The War Office got there before you.  Forbidden.  It’s a good game, isn’t it?  This form, however, is about jam.’

‘Jam.’

‘Jam.’

The fair man felt he was prepared to converse with this officer, whose name he should know but did not, using only the word jam, until 0600. It made as much sense as anything else he’d done in the last twenty-four hours.  In the last twenty-four days. Jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jamjamjamjamjamjamjamjamjam. The hut said _pang-pang-pang_. And this was jammy life at base, the jammy resort of jammy bastards.  Up the line—he started to cough again; the other man made a gesture of hopeless compassion in the direction of the tin of cocoa and returned to his figures.

‘Did you know Langley?’ the dark man asked without looking up.

The dark-haired captain, the other thought, looked a bit like Langley. Similar build: small and tidy.

‘Not, ah, socially.’  The fair man was the son of a market gardener. Major Langley was—had been—a duke.  An earl.  A viscount.  Something like that.  Eldest son holding his father’s subsidiary title, maybe that was it.  ‘Bloody shame, him and Delapole on the same day.’

‘At least—at least it was _for_ something.’  He caught the accent beneath a layer of clipped, public-school conformity.  The dark man was Welsh.  All Welshmen are called Davies or Thomas.  Or Williams or Jones.  He was not called any of those.

‘Seven foot of English ground, eh?’  The story of Harold Godwinsson’s response to Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge had been one of the fair man’s favourites when he was a schoolboy.  The other officer looked at him with unadorned distaste.

‘I’m sorry.  You did, I suppose.’

‘Don’t mention it.  It was about the size of it anyway.  We were at school together.’

The fair officer fought to keep his face wooden.  He didn’t want to hear some touching story about one having fagged for the other, or beaten him into a dead faint over a crib.   He had gone as a day boy to the King’s School in Canterbury.  Before the war he had been a chartered accountant.  The dark man decisively inscribed a total at the base of the form, and groaned.

‘It can’t be.’

‘Here, let me look. It—it used to be my business.’  This was not a suggestion born of altruism: the dark man’s name was bound to be somewhere on the sheet.

‘It’s perfectly all—oh, here, take the bloody thing.’  He pushed the papers across the trestle table in a tight, controlled movement that was half an inch short of raving hysteria.

The mistake was elementary, but it had been made early on.   Twenty thousand pounds of jam. Jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jam jamjamjamjamjamjamjamjamjam.  The hut said _jam-jam-jam_.  In the Elizabethan theatre they made thunder and alarums by manipulating a sheet of metal.  He looked at the signature and the printed name beneath. One of those wretched Welsh double lls.  He knew it wasn’t pronounced fl- or cl- exactly, but he was dashed if he knew exactly how it was said.  Of course, he knew him now.  He remembered the snuffling drunk—extraordinary purple, carbuncular face—and his pal, proper barrack-room lawyer, hurling malapropisms.  It was an incontrovertible case of desertion, aggravated by theft from a church: there was nothing the Welsh captain could have said that would have stopped the drunk being tied, drunk, into a chair and shot, drunk, but he’d been unnecessarily stiff-necked about it all the same.  The fair officer wished he hadn’t looked at the signature. He worked methodically through the calculations.

‘That greasy little Geordie runner of an acting lance-corporal it was told me—Bates—obsequious fellow.  I think somehow I was still expecting the messenger in a tragedy.  For them, you know, men who’d been gods to me when I was fourteen years old. Thirty lines—a hundred—hexameters of praise.  But they just fucking drowned in the fucking mud.’

The fair man had an obscure horror of a particular sort of clayey mud.  He made an embarrassed consolatory noise and huddled down into arithmetic.  Finally he had the botched account straight.  The Welshman folded his arms on the table and rested his head on them.  Periodically his whole body shook with something, a snore or a sob.  Gower didn’t care which. The hut said _pang-pang-pang_.

‘Here, Captain Fl—Cluellen,’—bugger, he’d buggered it up.   How did they ever get anything said?  Hissing like geese, catting like cats. The other had been gazetted before him, he knew that, and a bit of calculated insolence disguised as courtesy couldn’t hurt. ‘I’ve done your sums for you, sir.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'they just fucking drowned in the fucking mud': Shakespeare's account of the deaths of York and Suffolk at Agincourt is idealised to say the least. They may well have been crushed to death or drowned in the mud of that recently-ploughed battlefield, as were so many French soldiers.


	2. 1908

‘Edward!’

Edward Langley put down his pen and turned in his chair. 

‘Hullo, Michael.  You look as if there’s something I can do for you.’

Michael Delapole appraised his particular friend feelingly.

‘You’re quite provoking when you’re all tousled and bleared by the commission of literature. But I come as Nanny, to get little Ned washed and combed for nursery tea.’

‘Hm?’

‘You really have forgotten, haven’t you, my dear? Our beloved Senior Commoner has invited us.  By Christ, what a _senex_ he is.  He must be _twenty_.’

‘He can’t possibly be.  Nineteen at the most.  The Head cashiers them at nineteen.’  

Michael looked elaborately sceptical and flung himself into the fireside armchair.  He was tall, rawboned and knobbly in physique, with hair a striking red-gold of the sort that does not outlast majority, worn in an aesthete’s swatch falling over bulbous hazel eyes.  His nose was rude and snub, his lips thin in a weak jaw.  Edward was rather short, stocky and compactly built, dark-haired and regular of limb.  There was something immoderately sensuous in his facial features.  They were thought of by the other boys as inseparables, though the constitution of their friendship was as complex an unwritten compendium as that of their country. Both were further distinguished by the athleticism that they declined to exercise in the service of school: at eighteen, Delapole was counted among the best real tennis players in England, and Langley was a noted huntsman, _de facto_ Master of the Hunt of which his father held the _de jure_ title.  He was writing, for publication, a history of the Hunt which had expanded under the pressure of grief into a treatise on the science and art itself. 

‘Not if they’re Beauforts,’ Michael said.

‘Harry Beaufort’s our age, and he’s already up.  St John’s, isn’t it?’

‘Which?’

‘Cambridge.’

‘Oh, Divinity, _natch_. Vile parsonical little swine.  All right, they’re not all entirely dense.  But Tom winds down one’s brain.  What on earth would a man stay for?’

‘Foretaste of senility, I should think.  Humoured, patronised, asked to play for the House though you can’t trot a hundred yards without having a seizure; elected to societies that wouldn’t have had you last half if you came spatchcocked with plum sauce.’

‘Oh my dear.  _Ne’er so well expressed_.’

‘Ass.’  Edward flicked a ball of waste paper at him.

‘I mean it. And you know it will be Welsh rarebit,’ Michael said viciously. ‘Loathsome.’

‘Ugh. Like Satan on the burning lake, but shent smalls and fetid stockings instead of brimstone, if you see what I mean.  How do you, though?’

‘Be—cawse friend Beaufort always retains the services of that queer little Welsh beast when he h-entertains—’ It pleased Delapole to anticipate remarks on his mercantile ancestry with occasional music-hall mannerisms.

‘—and he thinks it amusing to have it cooked and served by a Welsh rabbit. Oh God.  Poor brute.  Imagine being one of _Beaufort_ ’s verbal jokes.’

‘He’s an appealing little creature, actually.  I happened on him on the fives court the other day, coached him a bit: he’s quick. The Organ of Veneration is, ah, very much enlarged, though; made me quite shy.’

‘I’ll believe you made shy by enlarged organs when I see it.  Hand me that waistcoat from the peg, will you?’  Edward divested himself of his black one, hanging it on the back of his chair.  Michael helped him into the ochre replacement, a privilege pertaining to their membership of a society whose _raisons d’être_ , other than illicit smoking and holding up traffic in the town with immense linked-arm processions, had been lost to the dark backward and abysm of time.  Before Edward could button it, Michael threw his arms bonelessly around his neck and gulped hoarsely,

‘Let me have you, Edward.  I know no-one can replace—I don’t want to.  I’ll make it a comfort, a solace for you, I swear.’

Edward’s fingers froze on the buttons and his neck and shoulders tensed. 

‘Tonight,’ Michael continued desperately, ‘or now, if you wish it, and hang Beaufort.  I can’t go on like this—see, you’re making me sound like a beastly stockbroker trying to seduce an under-gamekeeper.  Come.  Please come.’

‘Michael—’  Edward shrugged him off, then regretting it, turned to take his forearm.

‘You’ve no idea how—m’tutor gave me this.’  He took a thin book limp-bound in calf from his pocket and handed it to Edward.

‘ _Phaedrus_.  Oh—’  Edward bit his lower lip and drew a sharp breath. 

Michael laughed weakly.  His smile was tight and bitter.  ‘Such an exquisite rebuke.  Everyone thinks they know what goes on, and, by God, they let one know so discreetly—and it’s all a Barmecide feast.’

Edward pushed the book back against Michael’s chest and, shuddering with self-mastery, reapplied himself to his buttons.

He wrung the book between his hands.  ‘Oh damn—oh Christ—Ned, I’m _sorry_. I’m _sorry_.  I deserve drowning in a millpond.’

‘It’s all right.  I know you didn’t mean—I can’t,’ he said stiffly, not looking up, ‘spend the rest of my life swooning like a drunken tart every time someone mentions—starv—starvation, after all.’  He stepped past Michael for his coat, which hung on the back of the door, and put it on. ‘Nothing Arabian Nights about Beaufort’s Welsh rarebit.’  He smiled, pliant with promise and mischief. ‘I think I’ll need something to wash the taste out of my mouth—we both will.’

He took Michael’s left lapel and drawing his face down to his, cradled his jaw in the other hand.  His lips brushed across Michael’s cheekbones, as if he were soothing blacked eyes, then met his mouth in a deep kiss, voracious and earthy.  Edward had always held himself aloof from the sort of banal, sordid traffic that had taught Michael how to please someone with lips and tongue: this experienced assurance could have only one source, who must haunt them the rest of their days. Michael didn’t care.  It was all he had wanted for years—though only let himself hope of obtaining it since—since February: a seal on the testament, the contract, that would bind their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story's Michael Delapole is an AU composite of Michael de la Pole, 2nd Earl of Suffolk (1367-1415) and his son, also Michael, very briefly the 3rd Earl (1394-1415). The former died of dysentery during the siege of Harfleur, the latter at Agincourt. Obviously it didn't suit my purposes to have as large an age gap as historically existed between the latter and Edward, 2nd Duke of York (1373-1415). The medieval de la Poles did, however, have mercantile antecedents: the 2nd earl's grandfather, Sir William de la Pole, was a wool merchant and financier.
> 
> Edward's history of the Hunt is an AU version of [_The Master of Game_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_of_Game).
> 
> The school which Langley and Delapole attend is Ayrton, the AU Eton of Julian Hall's novel _The Senior Commoner_. As to other allusions, they don't matter a bit, but for the interested, that copy of _Phaedrus_ does indeed, some 20 years later, end up in the hands of Ralph Lanyon, and Delapole did stay, and shoot with Clive Durham.
> 
> I have swapped the order of birth of the Beaufort brothers: Henry was the elder, though an exact date of birth is recorded for neither as far as I know: both were born c. 1377, and were junior rather than senior contemporaries of York and the 2nd Earl of Suffolk. I claim AU licence.


	3. 1917

Mick Williams made it back to his tent in the early dawn, about an hour after the All Clear had sounded.

‘Well, I tell you one thing, Alec, we’re not getting out of here at fucking six a.m., anyway.’

‘I’d guessed; it’s been chaos since that air raid started. Can’t say I’m devastated, exactly.’

‘But listen. The captain’s under the M.O. Broken collarbone, couple of cracked ribs.’

‘What? Gower? Won’t stop _him_ getting the draft off, bloody termagant.’

‘I dunno, mate. I was just going into the hut when the shell hit. You know how it is: like someone dropped a ten ton weight two floors down, and the air goes solid. And when I got to my feet again the captain was still in his chair, but flattened against the back end of the hut, on his back with this other cove on top of him. Another officer, dunno who he was: couldn’t see much in the dark, and all the blood and—other stuff. He’d stopped one of those candlestick lumps of shrapnel. With his head, like. Half head, half strawberry jam, it was. Well, me and Bates pulled the body off of him—all sticky.’

Alec saw that what he had thought streaks of mud on his friend’s face, tunic and hands were the wrong brown for this country of marl and lime. 

‘And the captain’s just lying there winded, you know the way his lungs aren’t what they were. So we tried to get him to his feet, get him out of there before we took another packet, and he rolled over—threw his arm across the dead bloke’s neck, and kissed his brow, the bit what was left. All gentle-like, like you’d put your little sister to bed.’

Alec made a ribald grimace. ‘I haven’t got a little sister. And I don’t want to know what you get up to with yours in Norfolk, neither—’

‘Fuck off, Court. I meant it was pure, sort of. But what I’m saying is I think he’s gone dotty.’

‘Gower? Nah. Sterner stuff. He’ll be strapped up and tearing strips off us before you can say knife. Come on, we might get an hour’s kip now, with a bit of luck. Here's your flea-bag.’

Williams crept into the brown wool sack, staining it with gore and mud, and gave himself up to tears.


End file.
